Amos Tutuola's strangely poetic writing was quick to gain recognition in England and America, but in his own country it was at first widely criticised because of its bizarre use of English and because Tutuola was dealing with a past which many people were trying to forget, a past associated with the old gods and the spirits of forest and village, an ancestral past whose traditions for many of the present generation had lost their powers of reassurance while still retaining some powers of fear and threat. Nowadays Tutuola's work is recognised and admired by a whole generation of more sophisticated Nigerian writers, who no longer feel the need to deny their roots, but Tutuola has little in common with these young intellectuals either. His writing does not belong to any mainstream. It is neither contemporary nor traditional. It is, really, quite timeless and quite individual, although Tutuola has been greatly influenced by his Yoruba background. (p. 126)

He is in a sense an epic poet who as a man belongs nowhere, and this isolation is both his tragedy and his artistic strength….

The Yoruba culture is rich in folk tales, stories of gods and spirits, talking animals, magic charms and powers, people who are transformed into gazelles or fish or birds. Tutuola draws deeply upon the folk tales and myths of his own people, using this material in a way that is strictly his own, sometimes taking snatches of Yoruba tales or characters from Yoruba mythology and recreating them in his own fantastic manner, sometimes combining past and present in such creatures as the Television-Handed Ghostess. He is able to use the Yoruba tales in a variety of ways because they are genuinely his, and often he does not seem to be using them consciously at all. They are simply his frame of reference, the terms in which he naturally tends to think. The tone of Tutuola's writing also resembles that of many Yoruba tales, for it is both humorous and poetic, and it fluctuates between a portrayal of beauty and lightness and a portrayal of grotesque ugliness….

[Whatever] his sources, in his best work Tutuola makes something new from his material. He writes very much out of himself, and his writing stands alone, unrelated to any other Nigerian writing in English. There is a tremendous courage about the man, for he has been able to go on alone, remaining true to an inner sight which perceives both the dazzling multicoloured areas of dream and the appalling forests of nightmare.

Tutuola's first book [The Palm-Wine Drinkard] is his masterpiece. It takes the form of an odyssey, a journey into the underworld which the hero undertakes in order to prove himself. It is really a journey of the spirit, in which the hero meets the monster-creations of his own mind, suffers torments, wins victories and finally returns to his own country, able now to rule it because of the wisdom his experiences have given him and because of the power he has gained through the terrors he has overcome. It is, of course, a classic journey, found in the mythologies of all cultures. It has been compared to Orpheus in the underworld, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to Dante, to the journey of Odysseus. (pp. 127-28)

[My Life in the Bush of Ghosts] approaches and in some ways even surpasses The Palm-Wine Drinkard in the grotesque quality of its visions, although the work as a whole is not as powerful as the first. 'Bush', to a West African, means the rain-forest or what Europeans and Americans might call the jungle. 'Ghosts' in this book are not the spirits of dead persons, but rather spirits who have never lived as people but have always inhabited their own spirit world which coexists with ours.

The hero is lost from his home and enters the Bush of Ghosts as a boy of seven. He emerges as a man many years later. [The critic] Gerald Moore sees the story as a kind of rite de passage, an initiation, and undoubtedly this is so. As well, however, the story is a journey into the depths of the subconscious. Tutuola may not have intended it to be this; indeed, if he had intended it, it probably would not have worked out that way, for this type of exploration has to be done out of necessity, not calculation. The book appears to be a painful setting down of the publicly suppressed areas of the mind. In this fictional guise, the forbidden can be looked at, and the horrifying or appalling side of the self can be brought into the open. The 'self' in this sense means all our selves, for although the forest looks (and is) different to every pair of eyes, it is there in varying shapes and forms for us all. Few are brave enough to look at it, and fewer still to record it.

It is a grim world we are shown here. There is an obsession with pain, flogging, humiliation, torture, excreta. The torments of the hero are feared but also masochistically sought. The image of the mother is an interesting and ambiguous one, for the boy keeps thinking of his own mother with warmth and affection, yet he encounters such repulsive mother-types as the Flash-Eyed Mother, whose entire attention, significantly enough, is taken up with the snarling and evil-looking infant heads which are sprouting all over her body, and who therefore neglects all her other ghost children, including the hero, who has been taken into the community as one of her family. (pp. 132-33)

The deep split in the mind between the old gods and the new is expressed poetically and with great power. Tutuola never in this book actually names the old Yoruba gods—in fact, he hardly ever refers to them as gods at all. The old gods inhabit his writing in the form of spirits and ghosts, and most of these are frightening…. The hero of the story fears all these ghosts very much indeed, yet he repeatedly seeks their company. He cannot get away from them. The attitudes to Christianity, as they appear in this book, are mixed, to say the least. The conflicts which are laid bare here are the same conflicts as those described by Achebe in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, but in the work of Tutuola the clash between religions is not being described as such and is perhaps not even recognised as such. It is brought out in quite a different way, in terms of the main character's suffering, a suffering which only if it is viewed very superficially can be believed in as being merely external adventure. The hero puts a yearning faith in the Christian God. He is always saying 'as God is so good—'. At one point he discovers his long-dead cousin in the tenth Town of Ghosts, and finds that the cousin has set up a mission. The mission sign—humorously and yet in a way almost heartbreakingly—reads, THE METHODIST CHURCH OF THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. Rarely has dichotomy been expressed in so few words.

The unacknowledged resentment against Christianity comes out almost with a sense of relief and release, like someone speaking a long-forbidden obscenity in order to break its haunting power. This resentment is perhaps not so very difficult to grasp, for it is directed against the religion which severed several generations of Africans from their own past. It appears in odd forms—sometimes by taking Christian rituals and turning them inside out or upside down. (pp. 133-34)

The old religions of Africa have combined with Christianity in some peculiar ways. The two have also clashed—and clashed tragically—within the individual minds of men. The whole story of this conflict is only now beginning to emerge clearly. A writer such as Achebe deals with it by trying to understand it and perceive it, by re-creating it within the personalities of his characters, characters who are not himself but who exist as themselves. This is the method of the novelist. Tutuola's method is poetic and intuitive. Here we get the conflict raw. Whether or not he means it to be there, it is there. (p. 135)

The ending is enigmatic. 'This is what hatred did.' This conclusion does not seem to make sense in the external context, but it has specific meaning if it is viewed as another direct and indeed tragic statement from the inner world. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the work of someone who has walked in the pit of hell, and who has been courageous enough to open his eyes while he was there….

[Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle] concerns the learning of wisdom through ordeal. It is not as strong a story as either The Palm-Wine Drinkard or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but much of it is written in a sprightly manner which is partly produced by the appearance of more conversation than the previous books contained.

Simbi is Tutuola's only book not written in the first person. He succeeds best with a first-person narration, as though he were able in this way to get inside the personality of the central character and to write with the unfailingly true sound of a human voice.

Simbi is the daughter of a wealthy woman. She is an only child and has been brought up in luxury. She is also naturally gifted, being a lovely girl and having a fine singing voice. But Simbi grows weary of her pleasant life, and longs to experience '… the "Poverty" and the "Punishment"'. She prays to know the meaning of poverty and punishment, and her dangerous prayer is quickly answered. (p. 136)

As with so much of Tutuola's work, under the lightness and humour, under the descriptions of enchanted places [in Simbi], there lies the continuing theme of pain, dreaded and yet sought. (p. 138)

[The Brave African Huntress] is something of a disappointment. It is altogether thinner in texture, not so richly imaginative as his first three books, although there are flashes of the old style—for example, in chapter headings such as The Animal That Died But His Eyes Still Alive (the heroine prudently salvages the animal's skull with its glowing eyes and uses it as a night light), or in beautifully expressive phrases such as 'Whisperly the king spoke—'. (pp. 138-39)

[Despite] the frequently humorous tone of the surface, the main underlying theme [of Feather Woman of the Jungle] is a masochistic one. For the story's hero the goal is to be achieved only through pain and humiliation, suffering which he is compelled to seek, not really for its own sake but in order that the enduring of it may permit the gates to be opened to the desired end. (pp. 145-46)

Amos Tutuola has a way of combining the macabre and the beautiful, the horrifying and the humorous, the familiar and the mysterious. One of the most impressive things about him when he is at his best is the vitality of his writing and the completely unstudied and casual way in which he makes his dramatic effects. (p. 146)

Essentially, however, the themes are dark ones, themes which can in no sense be said to exclude any one of us…. [The] magic is never a mock-up, never a sham—it is always the real thing. But if Tutuola's books are for children [as some critics suggest], it is only in the same way that Gulliver's Travels was once thought to be.

Tutuola's books are not really novels. They are episodic and they follow the classical lines of the sagas found in all cultures. He writes best when most intuitively and most intensely inward. His forests are certainly and in detail the outer ones but they are, as well, the forests of the mind, where the individual meets and grapples with the creatures of his own imagination. These creatures are aspects of himself, aspects of his response to the world into which he was born, the world to which he must continue to return if he is to live as a man. (pp. 146-47)